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Adin Scannell talks about gVisor - a container runtime that implements the Linux kernel API in userspace using Go. He talks about the architectural challenges associated with userspace kernels, the positive and negative experiences with Go as an implementation language, and finally, how to ensure API coverage and compatibility.

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Uber’s engineering team wrote about how their big data platform evolved from traditional ETL jobs with relational databases to one based on Hadoop and Spark. A scalable ingestion model, standard transfer format and a custom library for incremental updates are the key components of the platform.

Martin Campbell, microservices scalability expert at DigitalOcean, talked about running a microservice based architecture with a distributed scheduler at MicroXchg Berlin 2017. He focused primarily on the problems encountered along the way, and the tradeoffs between offerings like Kubernetes, Nomad, and Mesos.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft introduced a new container service called Azure Container Instances. This service has been positioned, by Microsoft, as a way to deliver containers with simplicity and speed, without VM infrastructure to manage.

At QCon New York 2017, Andrew Spyker and Amit Joshi presented “A Series of Unfortunate Container Events at Netflix”. Key takeaways from running production workloads within containers running on the AWS Cloud include: expect problematic containers and workloads; there is continued need for cloud to evolve for containers; and it has been worth the effort due to value containers unlock.

Nine months after acquiring BoldRadius, Lightbend announced their acquisition of OpsClarity, a company specializing in monitoring reactive applications. InfoQ interviewed Mark Brewer, president and CEO at Lightbend and Alan Ngai, co-founder of OpsClarity and now VP of cloud services at Lightbend to learn more about this new partnership.

A recent article compares some of the container orchestration options available today. They range from open-source ones that can be self-hosted, to containers-as-a-service offerings, which again range from startups to enterprise players.

The Twitter Engineering team has recently provided an insight into the evolution and scaling of the core technologies behind their in-house infrastructure that powers the social media service. Core lessons shared included: Architect beyond the original specifications; there is no such a thing as a “temporary change or workaround”; and documenting best practices has been a “force multiplier”.

Amazon is the first cloud provider to support Windows Docker containers in their managed container platform - the AWS EC2 Container Service. The new beta service for Windows has several restrictions, but it paves the way to running multi-platform solutions across a single cluster of container hosts.

Kubernetes 1.3 has been released with improved support for scaling clusters up and down, cross-cluster federated services, improved local development tooling, support for CoreOS’s rkt container format, foundations for the emerging OCI image format and CNI networking standards, and the inclusion of the alpha ‘PetSet’ feature that enables support for implementing stateful applications.

Magnetic.io are creating a new open source microservice deployment platform named VAMP, or Very Awesome Microservices Platform, which offers a ‘platform-agnostic microservices DSL’ for deployment, A/B testing, canary releasing, autoscaling, and an integrated metrics and event engine. InfoQ recently sat down with Olaf Molenveld, CEO and co-founder of magnetic.io, the company building VAMP.

At Cisco Live 2016, held in Berlin, the latest version of Cisco’s open source microservice platform, Mantl, was released. New features include multi-data center configuration via tooling like Project Calico, simplified version control of a developer's entire infrastructure configuration, and blue/green testing as part of a service upgrade process.

Microsoft has recently announced the Azure Container Service has reached preview status. The service was first discussed at the AzureCon event earlier this fall and is now available to customers through a self-nomination process.

Force12.io have released a prototype ‘microscaling’ container demonstration running on the Apache Mesos cluster manager, which they claim starts and stops ‘priority 1’ and ‘priority 2’ containers more rapidly than traditional autoscaling approaches when given a simulated demand for the differing workloads. InfoQ discussed the goals and methodology of this approach with Force12.io’s Ross Fairbanks.